


Sweeter Than Cherries

by jerseydevious



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: A Weird Amount Of Emotions About Kitchen Tables, Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, No proofreading we die like mne, Pining, so emma let me borrow her idiots to lovers fic universe for a second
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26353519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Sweeter than cherries, better thanFlash Gordon,and being in love with your best friend is never easy.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Comments: 17
Kudos: 153





	Sweeter Than Cherries

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bipercabeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bipercabeth/gifts).
  * Inspired by [and they were roommates](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17583980) by [bipercabeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bipercabeth/pseuds/bipercabeth). 



> I stole a fic universe. "and they were roommates," by @bipercabeth on both Tumblr and AO3, to be specific, and I had permission but I don't think I had permission to do what I ended up doing. If you're familiar with the fic, you can probably place where this happens at. If you're not familiar with the fic, you can probably understand this just fine, just know...... that you should totally go read that fic. It's so good.

They’d put together their kitchen table wrong. A leg had ended up too short, somehow—they’d managed to attach one of the support braces to the slot where the leg was supposed to go without noticing, and by that point, Percy couldn’t have been fucked to take it apart again. It was a thirty-three-dollar table. It was allowed to rock back and forth. Annabeth had disagreed, naturally, because Annabeth was something of a stickler for things being in their proper place, up to and including when their proper place was a complete disarray. His mom had saved the day. At some point she’d slipped out through the front door, and she’d come back carrying a hefty blue textbook with a jaguar emblazoned on the front, and Percy had the clearest memory of being ten and looking down at the same textbook and thinking he’d rather the jaguar leap off the page and eat him alive than ever do any of the math problems in it.

“How old is that,” he’d said, because he remembered it, now. How he’d hated carrying it home because it was so heavy and how he’d cried over more than one page, the amount of childish, insensate hate he’d directed at that damn jaguar.

“Oh, old,” his mother had said, tucking one of her dark curls behind her ear. She did that when she was nervous. “You know, we—we forgot to take it back, after. I was going to… it’s just been sitting. I was—going to give it away. But, you know.”

And then she’d leaned over and wedged it between the end of the not-a-table-leg and the linoleum floor, and it had fit perfectly, and Percy had tried to beat back the image of his mother lovingly packing a textbook he’d never use again when they’d moved. Unpacking it, storing it somewhere Percy would never think of it again, a keepsake for herself; a physical memory, of every night she’d sat with him at the kitchen table leading him inch by painful inch through his homework. The way he’d inevitably get frustrated trying to follow the wicked scrawl of words that explained how a problem was to be done, and his mom would wipe his tears with her thumbs and press a warm, dry kiss to his forehead and say, _it’ll take time, baby, just be patient._ A physical memory of the fact that there was a time in his life when making it to high school had seemed impossible, and now it was wedged beneath the not-a-table-leg of the same table he’d finish homework from his college classes from.

He’d crushed his mom to his chest when he’d said goodbye to her later. He’d thought about the jaguar and the way his mom had used blue jellybeans to help him understand, and her hair was still up and she was still wearing her apron from work, because she’d come home from covering a shift, only to find her son staring at the same problems he’d been when she’d left. He tried to voice the things he wanted to say, but couldn’t, at least not in front of Paul or Annabeth; I made it because of you, I’m only here because of you, I don’t know if I can ever live up to what you did for me. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be good enough to deserve what you gave up for me. And his mom had cupped his face and urged him down, and he’d scrunched up, and she’d pressed a warm, dry kiss to his forehead, the way she’d always done. She’d left and he’d been himself, a kid in a man’s body, watching her go and wondering why growing up felt so much like leaving something behind.

Their table wasn’t exactly steady, even if it didn’t wobble like a sailboat caught in a hurricane. It rocked beneath Percy’s folded arms, and his head snapped up, blinking.

“Morning,” Annabeth said, shuffling the grocery bags in her arms.

Percy jerked upright, scrubbing his face. “Morning?” he said, startled, glancing at the—

Annabeth held out a hand. “It’s not morning,” she said. “It’s seven. At night. I should say that it’s night.”

“Night,” Percy repeated, relaxing into his chair. He scrubbed his face again, and now that he wasn’t thinking _how many classes have I fucking missed,_ he was well-aware of the ache pounding in his back and shoulders, a mixture of exercise-related soreness and the soreness that came from deciding to fall asleep on a kitchen table. He stretched his arms over his head, and as pleasant as it felt, it didn’t untie the knot of barbed wire working into the muscles there.

Annabeth was at the sink, now, not looking at him in a way that felt intentional. When she did turn, her cheeks and nose were pink, and Percy thought she must’ve been cold. “You—forgot the dishes,” she said.

“Ah,” Percy said, intelligently, and then he scrubbed his jaw again. He only vaguely recalled whatever Annabeth had said to him before she’d left. He’d been half asleep.

The worst thing about exhaustion was that exhaustion liked to remind a body that it existed after it should have been dead and gone. Percy had cut back on his work schedule and now he had a span of several hours in the early evening, an exciting development that meant he could stop trying to do homework after midnight; but now the only thing he wanted to do when five in the afternoon rolled around was sleep like the dead. It was the heavy-lidded, bones-made-of-lead tired, the kind of tired that didn’t bear arguing with. He supposed his body was crashing, coming down from the breakneck speed he’d been going, but it was annoying that he could be doing his homework at a reasonable time and he was still doing it after midnight. Even if it were less miserable when he’d had a nap first.

“You good?” she asked, and, oh, she hadn’t been at the sink just to observe the lack of clean dishes that was his fault, she’d been putting away a fresh pack of sponges. He wanted to tell himself _the world doesn’t revolve around you, relax,_ and _you should have done the fucking dishes_ at the same time, and somehow he felt a little guilty about feeling guilty, and man, he was just about through with being tired.

Annabeth slipped back over to the gathering of bags on the table, and Percy shook his head, and pushed himself out of the chair, because the least he could do was help her put away the groceries.

“You can go back to sleep,” she said, gathering a carton of milk in one hand and a quart of yogurt in the other. “I don’t mind.”

Percy reached into a bag, and his hand bumped soft plastic, and he pulled out a bag of—cherries. Cherries, in New York, in winter, and they were perfectly round and a deep, dark, almost purple kind of red. Percy didn’t think he’d had a cherry that didn’t come in a milkshake for three years. “Cherries,” he said.

“Oh, I, uh,” Annabeth said. “I—I just felt like it. I saw them, and—they’re not in season, they won’t really be good, but it’s—you like cherries, right? I can’t eat all that myself.”

The last time he’d eaten cherries had been with Annabeth, even, but he couldn’t say that, not around the sudden tightness in his throat. It’d been summer and they’d split a bag on his mom’s couch, watching Zathura. Her hair had been around her shoulders because that was when she’d tested out whether she liked it short or not, and it had been a thick mass of curls framing her face, like a honey-gold halo, and her cheeks had been pink then, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do, they’re—sweet.”

She grinned in response. Percy’s heart flipped and then slammed, hard, against his sternum, because he wanted to know what that smile tasted like, if it tasted sweeter than cherries. Annabeth was in his life and that should have been enough, but he was standing in his kitchen, staring at the bag of cherries in his hand and trying not to think about her lips on his, trying not to think about murmuring _I love you_ against her neck. It should have been enough.

They finished putting away the groceries and Percy washed up the dishes, and then he pulled out the bowl they usually used for popcorn and dumped half the bag of cherries in it, because, to be honest, he was kind of starving. The thought of making anything for dinner, or walking anywhere, or even dialing up a delivery, seemed—tiring. If he cashed in his half of the cherries in one night, Annabeth probably wouldn’t mind. The TV crackled to life behind him, as Percy was rinsing the cherries and draining them awkwardly, because he’d forgotten to while they were in the bag.

“What are you watching,” he called.

_“Flash Gordon,”_ she shouted back.

Percy snagged the bowl—and one of the plastic grocery bags, for the stems—and leaned in the doorway. She was sitting with her back pressed against the arm of the couch, at the end farthest from him. “Can you please stop taking movie recommendations from my mom, I’m starting to feel old.”

Annabeth snorted. “You feel old,” she said. “You feel old? Can you imagine how much older I feel, being your senior—”

Percy plucked a cherry out of the bowl and lobbed it at her head. It bounced off of her perfect button-nose, and she caught it in her lap, and glared at him. “You’d do that to an elderly woman, would you,” she said.

Percy opened his mouth to retort, and then he realized Annabeth had changed into shorts, and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth like it was made of sandpaper. He usually had some warning, before Annabeth started wearing shorts again; some time to prepare, because, if he felt like being honest, Annabeth’s legs were long and toned and gorgeous. She was gorgeous, in the whole of her, but sometimes it was hard to think about her as a whole, too overwhelming. He had to focus—her hair, her nose, her lips, but a lot of the time it was her legs, and the scar that rippled over one knee from where she’d scraped it, and the little white circles where she used to pick at her bug bites obsessively as a kid.

“Percy!”

Percy jerked. He hoped he hadn’t been obviously staring at her. Maybe he could just say he was entranced by Flash Gordon.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” she asked. “Please tell me you did.”

“I did,” he said, and he shuffled to the other side of the couch, and tried to pretend like tapping her ankle didn’t send a tiny thrill down his spine. “Move, move, you couch hog.”

Annabeth folded her legs beneath her, which was a blessing, because Percy wanted to be able to string a sentence together, maybe have a coherent thought. She was looking at the cherries, and Percy settled the bowl in the space between them, and she took a cherry by the stem and bit the fruit off, and Percy ought to stop staring at her mouth.

“You just seem a little distracted today,” she said.

I think you do this on purpose, he wanted to snap, but he said, “Sleeping it off, I guess,” instead.

In response Annabeth’s eyes pinched at the corners in concern, and then she scooted across the couch, hefted the cherries and the stem-discard-bag into her lap, and pressed against her side. It was electrifying, and he felt more settled than he had for a while, and maybe that was because it was electrifying—the energy of her presence, all-consuming, intense, burning like the center of a volcano, the only thing he could think about with her arm wrapped around his. They’d done this a hundred times, a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, even, and it still felt like the biggest thing in the world, it still made his heart thunder like racehorses turning the curve of the track.

You mean everything to me, can I tell you that, he thought. He bit off a cherry, and, absently, tied the stem into a knot with his tongue, before pulling it out of his mouth and dropping it into the bag.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” she said. He wasn’t imagining it—her cheeks were beet red, spreading over her ears and down her chest, and it was the shorts, she was cold.

Percy stuck his tongue out at her. “I can be mysterious. I have skills.”

“Like falling asleep at the kitchen table all the time,” she said, grinning, and picked up another cherry.

Percy had to duck his head, at that, because he’d know the answer to that, if it had been a question. That he’d always gravitated to the kitchen because it was the one space that belonged to his mother, for the most part, that when he had a nightmare his mom would be at the kitchen table instead of the bed she shared with her first husband. He had small, soft memories of being scared of thunderstorms, of sitting in his mom’s lap at the age of six and shaking because the thunder sounded like the sky was shouting, and one arm would be wrapped around him and pulling him close, the other flipping through the pages of her GED preparation workbook. The answer to that, if it had been a question, was that he’d always done it, a rare habit that was older than his friendship with Annabeth.

“That’s a bold statement, coming from someone who fell asleep on the living room floor,” he said, and he was grinning despite himself.

Annabeth shoved his shoulder. “I hate you more than anything,” she said. “You’re the worst. Flash Gordon is my new best friend.”

“What does Flash have that I don’t,” Percy said, gesturing the TV. “I can fall asleep at a kitchen table, and, uh, tie cherry stems with my tongue.”

“I guess that means you’re a good kisser,” Annabeth said, and she jolted, and offered, “your future girlfriend is, ah—lucky, just. Lucky.”

_Future girlfriend,_ Percy thought, and his heart ached. His skin was on fire and the girl beside him reminded him of a caldera, all energy and heat, the way she seemed to burn through him without even trying. Future girlfriend, and Percy hated the idea of that, hated the idea of a future where—what was the point, really, if he’d never know whether Annabeth’s smile tasted sweeter than cherries?

“I can teach you how,” Percy said. “It’s not hard. You, too, can be better than Flash Gordon.”

Annabeth wouldn’t look him in the eye, but she said, “Teach me your ways, Mr. Better Than Flash Gordon,” the way he knew she would, because Annabeth wasn’t Annabeth if she wasn’t rising to a challenge.

Percy pulled the stem off of a cherry, tossed the fruit in his mouth. When he’d finished chewing, he said, “It’s harder with fresh cherries,” he said. “You have to—uh, soften the stem.”

“That’s gross,” she said.

_“I’m_ gross,” he countered, and, yeah, maybe not his best comeback, because Annabeth was barely restraining an ear-to-ear grin and her eyes sparkled in the way that meant she desperately wanted to make fun of him.

“Once you do that,” he said, after the stem felt soft enough, “you hold it the long way on your tongue, and then press it to the roof of your mouth. Then you kinda—push it forward? Until you bite it with your teeth, and then the stems kind of cross over, because the whole thing is bent. And then you just push one tip through the loop with your tongue, and then pull it tight—”

He demonstrated, which was difficult, because it was a thing done entirely with the mouth closed, up until the end, really. When he’d tied the knot he pulled it through his teeth, showed it off, and dropped it in the bag. But Annabeth’s eyes on him were sharp and calculating and he felt like she could see through him.

“Tying the perfect cherry knot,” he said. He almost kicked himself for saying it, because _tying the perfect knot_ made him think about weddings, and—he couldn’t think about weddings, while teaching his best friend, who would only ever be his best friend, how to pull off a party trick that signified a good kisser. He tried retracing his steps, seeing where he’d gone wrong in his life that led to this, where he couldn’t share a bowl of cherries with a friend because of how fruit-related innuendo, of wedding-related innuendo, and—he should’ve just put his head down and gone back to sleep.

She was beautiful. Her curls were still honey-gold and rich and her eyes could flay him alive, he thought, and every inch of her was an inch carved out of adversity. Every part of her was the result of her drive to keep moving, to keep hoping. Sometimes Percy thought Annabeth’s spine was carved from steel. _You’re incredible and I think everyone should tell you that, every day,_ he wanted to say.

“It’s kind of dumb,” was what he said.

They finished the bowl of cherries. By the end of _Flash Gordon,_ Annabeth tapped his shoulder, rapid-fire, and Percy shook awake from the doze he’d been slipping into, and Annabeth held up a cherry knot.

“Did it,” she said, triumphantly. “I told you I would.”

“You’re now officially a good kisser, and better than Flash Gordon,” Percy said, softly, and what he wouldn’t have given, to test how good she really was.

She flushed. “I knew that,” she said, stiffly, and then she stood and stretched. “Go to sleep. In a real, actual bed.”

_Can it be yours,_ and Percy had almost been tired enough to say it, almost. He needed to fix his sleep schedule. He needed to shake the last of—whatever this tiredness was. She bid him goodnight and he returned it, and shuffled off to sleep, made sure an early morning alarm would wake him up so he could finish the work he was supposed to have already done. It took him a while to sleep. He was too busy thinking about what it would be like, to hold Annabeth Chase, all of the little things that added up to the whole of her, and be able to say _girlfriend_ instead of _best friend._

**Author's Note:**

> So technically all I was told was pining. And, I, being overdramatic, decided...... the best way to pine? Cherries.


End file.
